Michael Giacchino won his first Academy Award last night. The Oscar for ‘Best Original Score’ went to his widely acclaimed score for the Pixar hit Up, a score that previously has been awarded the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and a Grammy among many other honours. Giacchino spoke about the dream coming true in his acceptance speech, saying to the “kid out there who do not have a support system” that “if you want to be creative, go out there and do it. It is not a waste of time.”

Ryan Bingham and T. Bone Burnett took home the ‘Best Original Song’ Oscar with “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart. The score from the same film was never in competition as it had been ruled ineligible.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has revealed this year’s Oscar nominations. No big surprises in the Best Original Score category, where Michael Giacchino’s Golden Globe-nominated score for Up was joined by Hans Zimmer’s Sherlock Holmes, Marco Beltrami’s and Buck Sanders’ The Hurt Locker, Alexandre Desplat’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and, of course, James Horner’s Avatar.

In the past ten years, Hans Zimmer has been the most commercially succesful film composer working in Hollywood. Other composers who join the exclusive club of composers who worked on films grossing over 2.5 billion dollars in the USA during the first decade of the new millennium are John Powell, John Debney, Danny Elfman, John Williams, James Newton Howard and Alan Silvestri. MovieScore Magazine has made an exclusive analysis of the US box office figures 2000-2009 and brings you the list of the top-100 most succesful film composers in the US.